Best Visuals at New York International Independent Film and Video Festival

Finalist at National Short Film and Video Competition of USA Film Festival

Honorary Opening Night Film at the Prague Film Festival

“Message to Man” International Film Festival (St. Petersburg, Russia)

SYNOPSIS

A woman’s dead lover comes to her in a dream and tells her about his love for her that neither time nor death can kill. She realizes that this is a dream and wanting him, attempts to summon him through witchcraft. Instead, the Guest from the Future appears and offers his help and himself, and so she finds herself in a triangle and questions the eternal worth of her lover and their love. Through her encounters with her lover and the Guest, the nature and fate of their stormy and complicated love in their past, present and future lives becomes clear.

The film is based on the lives and works of Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev, two of Russia’s great 20th-century poets.

Anna Akhmatova, born in 1889, is considered one of the world’s greatest 20th-century poets. A wild girl, a poet, a prophet, “a witch” (Gumilev), “half-harlot, half-nun” (Stalin), she became famous for her haunting poetry. Her childhood friend, Nikolai Gumilev, was a poet, a scholar, a traveler, a teacher, a publisher, an officer in the Tsar’s army. In love with her for many years, he proposed to her several times and each time she refused to marry him. He tried to kill himself. She finally gave in, believing that he was her Fate. Friends, both talented and famous poets, they shared a profound love of European culture and interest in the wisdom of the East. Their marriage, however, did not work out. She asked for a divorce.

In 1921 Gumilev was arrested on the false charge of counter-revolutionary conspiracy, executed and buried in an unmarked grave. His death was a shock to Akhmatova. She used to go to the place where he was executed, looking for his grave. But it took her years to realize how significant he was to her and how connected they were on a higher level, and later in her life she experienced an overwhelming longing for him.

In the years following the revolution of 1917 Akhmatova lost most of her close friends. Some, like Gumilev, perished at the hands of the Bolsheviks, others emigrated. Akhmatova stayed and witnessed the horrors that befell Russia, living through the revolution, the Civil War, two World Wars, the Great Terror, the 900-day siege of Leningrad, evacuation in Central Asia, the Cold War. Her own life seemed surreal to her (“I to myself, from the very beginning seemed like someone else’s dream or madness, or a reflection in somebody’s mirror...”)

In 1946 a distinguished Oxford professor, who at the time was provisional First Secretary of the British Embassy in Moscow, visited Akhmatova in Leningrad. He was Sir Isaiah Berlin, a great admirer of Akhmatova’s poems. Berlin was followed to Akhmatova’s by another visitor, Winston Churchill’s son Randolph. Rumors quickly spread that Winston Churchill, another admirer of Akhmatova’s poetry, was sending a special airplane to take her to England. When Stalin learned about the visitors that Akhmatova had received, he said, “Our nun is now receiving visits from foreign spies.” The day after Isaiah Berlin left Leningrad, men in uniform were posted at the entrance to her staircase, and microphones were installed. The relative freedom of communications with Westerners that the government allowed during the war was over. The Cold War began. Akhmatova’s poems were no longer published. She knew that she was watched and that there were informers among people close to her. She burned her manuscripts. A few trusted friends memorized her poems. In Akhmatova’s poems Isaiah Berlin became the Guest from the Future.

In the 1960s she finally received the recognition she deserved. Her poems were published once again. In 1964 she received the Taormina Prize in Italy and in 1965 she went to England to receive an honorary doctorate from Oxford University. In Oxford, Anna Akhmatova again met with Sir Isaiah Berlin, her Guest from the Future. She died in 1966.

“A Dream Within a Dream” is about love, passion, betrayal. It is also about connections that are stronger than earthly relations, it is about eternal bonds that nothing can break or diminish. People who were important to Anna Akhmatova in life, continued to be part of her life even after their death. Her conversations with them never ceased. The people we truly love are always with us.